In this Essentials video, I want to give you a refresher or an introduction to some of the modelling tools that I like to use in my block in high poly and low poly process as well as some of the ways that I used them. Maybe you've taken on my previous video on low poly modeling or maybe you have a little experience with Maya and different modeling program already and you have some foundational understanding of the different tools you can use to model inside of Maya. But if not or you're looking for a refresher, I want to go over some of the tools that I use in my Workflow. How I use them and specifically what I use them for. So, I like to think about especially hard surface objects from the box model and methodology. Meaning that I start with a box that approximates the shape and proportions of what I'm looking for. Then I can start working with tools to adjust this box until it gets me a more refined or blocked inversion. Then I move on to creating a high and low poly version from that. It's my own particular workflows. Some people prefer to work high and then make a low poly based of this. Some people like to start with our low poly geometry and then make a new high poly geometry based of that. I like this sort of mid poly method because I find it helps me focus on shapes and it saves me time in the long run because making the high and the low from a really refined out mid poly often doesn't take nearly as long. So one of the most common tools that you'll see is used and it probably the most essential of all of them is Extrude. Extrude is pretty easy. You select a face or an edge although usually a face, and you can shift right now mouse down to extrude face. In this case you can do thickness but here I'm going to use an offset. I use this a lot because I might need a planar face and I want an even number of edges around. That's a result that might be a lot harder to get with other kinds of techniques, other kinds of cutting techniques. But with an offset, I always know that this border of face ring here is always going to be evenly spaced. It's really great for creating insects too because if I do another extrude with thickness or I use these manila manipulators, I get a nice little inset into this overall model. Another way though I can do this is by just selecting this face here and I can hold shift. In more recent versions of Maya, shift will actually extrude for me depending on which tool I use. So if I shift and extrude here, it's going to also create a little offset although it won't be as evenly spaced out as the other one that I can use from the model toolkit. So I might go Extrude phase offset to make sure I get even spacing, and then go to my move tool and shift drag down to get my extrude. All these tools are essentially either moving, or creating extroverts, or removing inverts. So that's really as many tools as there are just different things to do that. The next tool that I really like using a lot and I use very frequently is Beveled edge. I find Beveled edge is really great for creating, smoothing or sloping sides. In the initial block in stage, I don't really concern myself too much with quad geometry, unless I really have a multi-curving surface it's not really a problem. So if this flat surface is way more than four sides but anywhere I have a curving surface I want four sides and generally, the Beveled edge will give that to me. If I do bevels together at the same time for instance, if I do these edges altogether on the back and I bevel all of them, you'll see that it'll actually combine the bevels and it gets them to wrap in with each other. So for instance, let's go back to this shape and say the back of this object is really flat but the front of the whole thing here is beveled and maybe the bottom is flat too. I might take all these and say I'm going to bevel all these corners here up my segments and we can see that it's going to keep everything in quads for me and make it really easy for me to just the scaling. That's a shape that might be really hard for me to get just write by hand but only takes me a couple of seconds using this particular approach, using the Bevel tool. The next tool that I use a lot is the Multi-Cut tool. There used to be a couple of tools that you used in the Multi-Cut tool is sort of a combo tool, it does a lot of them together. In fact, if you go to the modelling toolkit you can see it has a lot more options if things it can do in here, although I rarely use the modeling tool kit except for a couple of special cases. You know some people who are newer to this really like it because everything you need it's right here and you can easily click on buttons and choose different methods of selection. Personally, I'm just really used to the Hotkey, the Shift right mouse contextual workflow. So I'd like to go to Multi-Cut and it's great for laying in a couple of lines. Maybe before I do and extrude on a surface like so can be really nice for that but also the Multi-Cut tool can let us make an in a more specific cuts. So, let's say I needed an extrusion that comes from the side, but I need something that curves from here to here. That would be pretty tricky to do. So what I might do is come from the side view and say okay I know that the shape that I want needs to start here and it needs to end there, and I can just click and drag over the surfaces to kind of create a curvature to everything. Maybe use my Multi-Cut to connect back up through the model here like so, holding shift will let me snap it. I'm going to just going to bring it up to there. I'll have to mirror this later and I'll show you how to do that. But now I can click these faces and I always like to make sure I have just what I want. Then it's pretty easy for me to extrude just this face off by itself. So again, Multi-Cut can be pretty handy for that. Sometimes I might be in a spot where I can see here, I just don't feel like I have enough edges along everything. Sometimes this is a place where I can take these edges and I can use bevel to increase the smoothness or definition of them and do a little clean up afterwards. But another thing I can do is what's called a Connect components. Now, without anything on connect components will just take any two edges and it will draw a line connecting between them. But if I come to the options, I can do insert with edge loop and we can see that connect components will actually let me increase the definition that runs along that face which can be really great if I'm trying to create like a curving form. Sometimes some adjustment with this is necessary. We can actually see here, it's creating maybe some extra faces that I don't want in terms of the model. But it's a really great wave especially on like cylinders and things like that for me to create some extra definition to curvature that might otherwise be really hard to do that on. Now, another thing I can do, especially if I'm, let's say I need to have across the surface a series of evenly spaced outrages. I might use the Connect tool between these two lines. By middle mouse dragging, I can choose a number of segments. Control shift right mouse, will let me choose to slide them left to right or pinch them closer or farther from each other. This can make sometimes some kind of confusing or difficult to model surfaces a lot easier. Now, of course I have a lot of N gowns here. I'd like to clean those up a little later if at all depending on where this model is going. But I find that starting from here and just roughing out my main shapes the blocket is the best way to go. The next thing I want to show is actually about deleting or removing edges. So sometimes I might have an edge that I feel like I don't want in my shape. Say, I don't want this edge. I want it to be flatter through here. Well, I can always delete this edge loop but you'll see I still have the votes there. What works a lot better is controlled deleting which now only removes the edges but actually removes the verts. Now if I forget it's not too hard to just select all the verts and if I hit delete on all the verts, it will only delete the verts that aren't already connected to a bunch of other verts. So what I already know is that those are okay for me to remove. Another thing though that I could do, if I'm trying to get rid of say, an entire edge ring by shift double-clicking these edges, is I can go to collapse edge which will actually collapse these edges altogether in a ring. Of course, if I want to take just enough verts that are close enough together, I could select these verts, go to merge vertices and change the distance threshold like how close they have to be before they start merging together. If I ever want two edges to be merged specifically together, I have a couple options. I might be able to select two edges and say merge vertices, merge to center and bring him to the center. I could snap these back into position. Or another way for me to do this is select that vert and I can use the target weld tool, which gives me a little quick widget tool that makes it pretty easy for me to just snap verts into place and reduce the number of extra verts than I might have on my system. Whenever I'm doing something like, let's do a mirror really quick, another tool I use a lot. I can always choose the direction. In this case I should be modeling everything here. I realize since I started working on this I'm actually looking at X forward. When I almost always want everything in Z forward when I'm working inside of Maya. So holding j with my rotate tool, just gives me a quick alignment and I freeze transforms so that it doesn't consider itself rotate along here. At anytime you're working a lot on a model you can see every tool that you create actually creates this little history. So a quick Shift Alt D can delete that history or we can go to edit, delete by type, history to do the same thing. It just sort of cleans up the model and says this is a new starting spot for it. So now if I come down to mirror I can choose which direction on the x axis and in this case I kind of go positive. It'll give me a little division down the middle. Sometimes I find with the mirror tool that the merge threshold can get a little aggressive and it's kind of calculated automatically but sometimes it will combine things together I don't want. In that case I'll turn off merge which means that these verts in the center are not connected together. But I find it's easier to just drag over all of them, go to merge vertices, and choose merge verts from here. Generally 0.001 will only merge verts that are directly on top of each other. Even though I'm not building this for smoothing right now I'll hit a quick three on my keyboard because what I'm just looking for is any seams that I might have by accident. For instance let's say, I'm going to detach these components. Let's say these things weren't seamed together. We start seeing some strange pinching happening in here and it looks like a strong edge and that's because again these aren't merged together. But if I do a quick merge verts and then I hit three again we can see that it's now smooth exactly like I'd expect it to be along the back. Speaking of detach component, sometimes I'll model two pieces at once say like, this is supposed to be a cap to this thing. Then I can take all of these pieces. Let's create a little multi cut from here to here and we'll take all of these edges and I can do detach component. What this will do will actually separate those edges into two different groups. Then I can take this whole model, shift right mouse and I can go to separate. So now I have two separate pieces and I can change their pivots independently. I can use this little isolate select to look at just one bit. Let's take this and we'll do a fill hole to fill everything in this little area. I'm going to take this face and let's do a bevel on everything. Because maybe we want a nice soft edge on this little piece. Let's do the same thing here. Take all these edges and fill hole, take these faces and I can do that bevel faces kind of thing that I was doing before and right in the middle of it I can turn off isolated to see how it's going to look. So maybe I need to do something like that but now I've been working with it and I don't want these to be two separate pieces. I've got the geometry the way I want it. It's pretty easy to select both pieces and now do combine. While they're two separate groups of geometry, it still treats them all as one object as you can see from our outliner right here. Another thing you might need to do is say, I want to make a perfectly circular hole through this. Well there's a couple of ways I could do that. I could take all these faces right here. If I want to make a circular hole opening here and I might extrude them with an offset, and now take this whole shape and try to circularize component. It's gets a little messy. This works a lot better. For instance, if I was going to do that say, on flat geometry or a flat surface. So say I needed a circular hole down here it would be much easier for me to go extrude offset and circularize. Then scale this down and now I can make a simple circular hole for the geometry. But as I said it's much harder to do here with the corners. So instead, I'm going to create a cylinder. I'm going to rotate on that side and I'm going look at where the cylinder intersects with the geometry of the shape. Now, if I select this object and shift select the cylinder, I can shift right mouse, go to Boolean and choose difference which will make a little cutaway. As we can see it makes some pretty messy geometry that'll be cleaning up. We can all but it makes it a lot better. It's much easier way of working getting these really nice cylinders. Of course I can change the operation to Union which will fuse these pieces together or even something like intersection which will just grab where those two pieces overlap. There's different cases you're going to want all of these in your models. Sometimes you want to make an average or a smoother movement of groups and this is where soft select is really helpful. So if I take this edge, I can drag this edge by itself. Actually this is a great use for r. Let's do vert and merge verts but this time instead of 0.001 I'm just going 0.01 which should help me merge all the sides of this together perfect. But I can take this edge and if I hit B on my keyboard you see this little radius comes up where there's yellow to fading into black. This means anything that's yellow gets a 100 percent moved and then it falls off from there. Holding B on my keyboard I can actually left mouse drag to affect its area which can be really helpful for getting subtle soft pulls forward. It's also really handy when you're working with models that have lots of geometry on them to be able to move them in groups. In fact, if we come to our Move tool we just double-click on this move symbol. We'll bring up our little tool menu. If I'm having trouble with any of my tools I usually like to go in and reset them just in case. We can see we have a whole soft Select menu that gives us a lot of options on how this soft selection will happen. Can even create some crazy patterns with everything but usually something like a standard works pretty well or depending on the shape you're trying to make a nice and linear curve might work really nicely. It just reset that tool. Again I can always hit B to turn off soft select again. Another thing I want to show you that I do use a lot in the modeling toolkit is some of the surface constraint. So we have two options, but one of the ones I like to use is the surface slider. Sometimes I need to make an adjustment to a vert. It's really helpful if you turn on surface slider, it will only move it along that surface. Especially if I'm trying to get a real curvature together and it's hard sometimes to control in three-dimensional space. This can let me make adjustments to how something comes in while still giving me a solid surface to work with. But just don't forget to turn that back off when you're done with it. Otherwise it'll really mess up stuff when you, for instance if I have surface line on and I tried to extrude it really makes things go pretty nuts. So you've got to turn that off. Now, so far I've been working just one side of the other, the mirror tools are actually really handy inside of Maya, I used to really dislike them. But the last couple of versions they've been really good. Control shift right mouse, will bring up our symmetry menu, and by going to symmetry we can turn it on. What this means is anything as long as our object is symmetrical, that happens on one side will happen on the other. It works with almost every kind of tool although sometimes that shift drag doesn't work. So it's best to just do a straight forward extrusion. It's worth taking some time due to play around with some of these settings. If you click this little hamburger symbol for instance while I'm in the extrude tool I see all these options. That I could choose in this moment like adding divisions and then creating a taper from them. Stuff that I wouldn't normally think to do but maybe a special case will come up where it's really handy or useful. So these are some of the tools that I like to use. Keep in mind that in to get used to when you're working inside of Maya. Of course there's lots of other workflows and lots of other tools, and I've sort of scratched the surface on how to approach modeling some of these things. But I wanted you to at least be familiar with the terms and what these tools are. So that when I start using them in the next video is on modeling you'll have some context for what we're doing.
